


There Are Witches In These Woods

by masterofstars



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Bugs & Insects, Gen, Hansel and Gretel Elements, Human Davesprite, Witches, dave and davis are brothers and they Fuck Up Big Time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofstars/pseuds/masterofstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was of course fences put up in place around the entire perimeter for the safety of the kids but the toes of two pairs of converse can fit so easily in the spaces between chain link.</p><p>“Isn’t there supposed to be weird stuff in here?”</p><p>“There will be. Just wait.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is a little bit of a mishmash between different fairy tales, so i wasn't sure what to tag it as, but the big one is hansel and gretel mixed with witchy things.
> 
> it's inspired by this song!! ==> The Woods by San Fermin and i'd suggest giving it a listen while reading it, i think it adds to it the blare witch project/red riding hood theme nicely

Every town has their folk stories. Whether horror stories of accidents that turn a place into a landmark for ghosts and ghouls, or if it’s old legends that linger around certain areas. Small towns are breeding grounds for these exact kinds of stories. You can’t pass a town along any high way that doesn’t have it’s own tall tales.

The stories in the small, hazy Texas town had been going for years. For a while, it was actually what kept it running with the tourists coming in to stay in the cheaply themed motels on the side of the freeway and coming down to the forest on the south side to speculate at the so called ‘supernatural’ formations and different natural occurrences that could be debunked by any botanist. If only people weren’t so adoring of anything occult or odd, they probably would have seen that. But the eyes see what they want the mind to believe.

Of course hype can only last for so long. The town became quiet, just a tiny hick town going unnoticed and unmarked on most maps sold at truck stops along the highway. The population was barely over 500 most years. With only a few citizen run stores, a gas station, a town hall, a small high school and even smaller middle school, it was what most people would call extraordinarily rural. The woods stretched around most of south and west edges of the town. Thin at the very edges, but everyone knew how thick they got the further you ventured in.

In a most unfortunate layout plan, the building closest to the woods had always been the middle school. There was of course fences put up in place around the entire perimeter for the safety of the kids but the toes of two pairs of converse can fit so easily in the spaces between chain link. With backpacks filled to the brim with supplies and sweaters pulled up tight around their necks, Davis and Dave had no problem hoisting themselves up over the loudly clinking metal to set off into the quiet woods.

They’d been planning it for a while. Having been born and raised their whole lives in the sleepy town they’d heard enough of the legends to know that they had to see for themselves. No matter how many times the stories ended in warnings to keep out of the woods, the blonde and ginger had spent nights awake in their shared bedroom making plans; mapping out what trails they could take after copying down the map on the signs, making checklists of what to bring, and of course, slowly saving up for what they would need. Both had spent the entire summer doing odd chores for their parents, their parent’s friends, whoever would have them and pay a pretty penny. By the very beginning of fall just before the school year would start, they had finally collected everything any casual hiker would have, with the bonus of no one being the wiser about it.

So their expedition began. The sun was still high as were their spirits upon entering. The scent of pine and earth was thick, the air still apart from the two boys talking and laughing. The odd stir of a bush or branch was the only signal of any other live apart from the insects in the moist ground that had a soft give under their sneakers.

“Isn’t there supposed to be weird stuff in here?” Davis asked after about an hour or so of just jokes and talk of Pokemon trading, who saw what on TV, how Dave needed a new CD player.

“There will be. Just wait.” The blonde, Dave, his voice was confident. He was older than Davis by just a year and taller by almost a full inch. It was the topic of more than a few of their fights.

One sigh and a short, impatient compliant later and they continued with just as much enthusiasm.


	2. Chapter 2

 

“It’s been kind of a long time. You said there would be stuff.”  
  
“There will be stuff.”  
  
“Mom will be pissed off if we aren’t home for dinner.”  
  
“Dude it’s fine. Don’t chicken out on me.”  
  
“Dave c’mon. It’s boring. I wanna go home, she’s making mac ‘n cheese.”  
  
Dave sighed out loudly. Of course, it had to be like this, little siblings always did this. They’d been walking for a while, and it was starting to get closer to dusk, the shadows cast on the ground growing longer and the sky slowly changing from it’s bright blue to a purple haze. Soon enough there would be sparks and streaks of orange to color the forest from green to hazel and auburn.  
  
While the blonde hated to admit it, Davis was right on one thing. They hadn’t seen anything. In all their walking along their paths marked on their maps it had been the same boring things. Only what nature had to offer anywhere else you went hiking. Dave didn’t want to admit it though. Admitting there wasn’t anything special would be like finding out there’s no Santa all over again. Just disappointment and dragging all the fun from the ghost stories. 

“I wanna look a little longer. Then we’ll leave.” Looking down at the map, Dave’s light brows furrowing together in annoyance at the paper covered in sharpie. 

Beside him Davis slouched his shoulders and trudged along. It had been decided that Dave would be official map carrier for the journey, since Davis ‘didn’t want the responsibility’. Which turned out perfect, since Dave got majority rule over what paths to take and where to go. So, when he decided to take a little detour, it went unnoticed by his little brother entirely.

 

Another half an hour, and it was getting dark quick. Summer was coming to an end and the days weren’t nearly as long. A rustling noise from somewhere beside them and Davis reached out to grab onto Dave’s sleeve.  
  
“Dude, what?” Dave paused to look at him.  
  
Davis didn’t look at him, focused on the bushes. “There was something there.”

It warranted a sigh from Dave, shaking Davis off to keep going. “Yeah, of course there’s something there. We’re not in the back yard. We’re in the forest, where things live.”

“No, it was big.” It was obvious that Davis was more scared than he was leading on, his voice steady but edging on a whine. “Can we go home yet?”  
  
“Soon, I said s-”  
  
The noise came again and this time Dave stopped too. Davis’ hold on his arm doubled in it’s strength, and both boys stared in the direction the noise came from for a long while. Maybe out of fear, maybe to see if the noise would come again. Hopefully even reveal itself to be just some squirrel under the foliage or a bird about to fly out like in every bad horror movie they’d watched when both parents were asleep.

But it never came. Nothing did. After a while they both lowered their defensive, tense stances.  
  
“…Can we go home now?” Davis asked again, more hopeful than the times before. 

Dave’s voice was better, if only by a bit. “Uh. Yeah, sure.” 

They turned around with their heads down and Davis still holding on to Dave’s sleeve loosely. Slowly the light went down and evening set in with the low sound of crickets and a few lonesome cicadas every so often. The noise had yet to resurface and they were both assured that it wouldn’t as they headed back. Or tried to. Dave followed the map and made sure to keep to it, getting back on the path as best as he could. 

 

For as long as it had taken them to get that deep into the woods it felt like it was taking too long to get back out. With everything looking nearly the same at every turn, it was too easy to get lost, but neither of them seemed to want to acknowledge that there was a chance of that. Neither seemed to want to talk at all. It was that feeling of fear- if you say something it will be the moment something happens. Things become real when you say them out loud. In their ten and eleven year old minds it was better to keep quiet about it and just hope for the best.  
At least, until it was near pitch black and Davis had to pull his flashlight out, casting light out in front of them.  
  
“This was stupid, you know. We should have done this earlier, waited until we could do it in the morning and had all day. This was the shittiest idea we’ve had.” Davis mumbled, tone bitter.  
  
“Yeah, whatever. Just keep the light steady so I can see the map.” Complaining wasn’t going to help, and Dave was frantic with the map at this point, trying to find where they were. Hardly looking up, trusting Davis to keep walking with him. He didn’t question when his little brother went quiet again, only when a few minutes later he spoke up.  
  
It was quiet. The kind of whispered voice Dave knew from late nights when they stayed up past their bedtime and spoke under sheet forts, talking of monsters and ghosts. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”  
  
“That.” 

A hand came up to point in front of them and for the first time in a while Dave looked up. In the too bright light of the flashlight it was hard to see at first, but it soon made out clearer. A circular shape in front of them, between the trees. It had a radius of a few feet, looking to be made of tree branches. At first glance it seemed to be man made, but as Dave’s gaze moved down it looked like there were roots, firm in the ground.  
  
“It’s… it’s just a tree. Duh.” He shrugged it off and kept his voice steady.  
  
At his side, Davis shook his head. “That’s a fucked up tree if I’ve ever seen a tree. And I’ve seen a thousand today.” 

“Doesn’t matter. Keep going.”  
  
“I- I don’t wanna. Can we go back?” The argument didn’t surprise Dave.  
  
“No, c’mon. It’s just a tree, we can go past it.” He tugged on his little brother’s sleeve, trying to get him to keep going.  
  
The flashlight wavered in Davis’ hand as he was pulled and he shook his head almost violently. “Dave, no! I wanna go back, we can go a different way!” 

“Don’t be a baby about it!” Dave’s own voice wavered, and for a moment he struggled with Davis before the kid stopped. At least stopped struggling. It was quickly replaced with trembling.  
  
It was confusing at first. It wasn’t entirely unlike one of them to be get worked up, and in the setting it wouldn’t have been surprising in the slightest, but the fact that Davis was quiet had the older blonde trying to figure out what the exact reason was. It took following Davis’ gaze, eyes glossy and looking like he was about to cry, for Dave to understand. He followed it. Looked from his brother down to the ground, to the base of the branch formation. What he thought was soil in the shaking light cast on it slowly started to move in a way that made his skin crawl. 

It wasn’t natural. The bugs that unearthed themselves inch by inch were too big by at least a few inches. It was normal to see them after rainfall. The kind of pill bugs that only came up from moisture. But they were too big, and there were too many. What looked like a never-ending amount. Too many legs crawled over dirt, pine needles and fallen leaves, the sound obscene from how close they were. 

“Ok! Go back, we’ll go back!” It wasn’t a question anymore. Dave nearly dragged his shaking brother for a few seconds to get him to start running. They both stumbled over the ground in their hast, too many times almost falling.

Neither looked back as they booked it in any direction away from the horrors behind them. The sounds continued to grow until it a low humming was added. Not to the air around them, but as if it had started in their ears instead of in the sound waves they should have. It grew as they both ran further and further away until the sound of the bugs was covered completely and left only with the ringing and the hum, vibrating through them both.

Dave told himself not to look back. Look over to Davis, sure. He did it periodically to see his brother clutching at him and wheezing, tears down his face and pushing himself to keep running. But looking back seemed like a death sentence and an urgent need at the same time. It pulled at him each time he turned his head even just the slightest bit. He had to see. Were they far enough? What was making that noise? Something had to be. They had to be away from that… thing. Whatever that tree was.  
  
He had to. With another quick look to Davis, he craned his head back to see over his shoulder. 

They had hardly moved. They’d ran for so long, but they were still there. The bugs were nearly at their feet and the sight of them had bile in his throat. “Keep running!” He called to try and scream it over the sound in his ear. 

Davis hardly heard it, only caught the muffled sound of his brother’s voice before his breath was taken from him. His own scream filled the air before it was cut off by something louder. Dave’s voice, shrill and piercing through the humming so painfully. It pulled Davis to look at a sight he instantly regretted.  
  
The blonde, on the ground. No, _in_ the ground. His sneakers were gone, the dirt and bugs up to his ankles as if he was sinking or… they were pulling him. He was being dragged with enough force that Davis’ hold on his sweater was hardly enough to keep him there.

“Let go.”

The words were loud and close to his ear and he screamed again, both arms reaching to try and grab at Dave as he sunk lower and lower. He wasn’t about to let go, but the hold around his torso was tight and starting to pull him back the opposite way, pulling him away.  
  
“He’ll pull you, too.”  
  
How was the voice so calm? Davis had tears streaming down his face and his throat felt like it was on fire. He could hardly see the blonde boy below him through his mess of tears, only blurs of him being pulled further. He couldn’t hold on but he tried. Even after the fabric slipped from his hand and he cried out in anguish. 

However was holding him tore him away then. Just as soon as his grip was gone, he was being carried away. Towed off as a soft, too sweet voice tried to calm his screams and his fight, his pleading to bring Dave back.  
  
“He’s gone, little one. You’re safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyones wondering about that demon tree [here ya go](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f1/7b/ff/f17bff33ddc15d1e7344f31210044178.jpg)


	3. Chapter 3

The thing about quiet towns is that nothing is ever kept quiet. Gossip spreads just as fast as the forest fires so commonly seen in the hot Texas summers. No one could keep their mouth shuts and no secret was ever safe. When word gets out of your children not coming home for dinner as usual, it becomes big news very fast, to say the least. To say the most would be to say that within the week the town’s main avenue was littered with cop cars. The school was surrounded and the forest was swept several times over. Interviews were given by the armful. No part of that small town was left alone, no stone left unturned, and yet…

Losing a child is one of the worst kind of sorrows imaginable. Losing two from unknown causes, with no evidence, no suspects, no reason - it’s unfathomable. The only thing that could possibly worse that the not knowing would be the burden of knowledge endured by one freckled, sun kissed ginger boy, not able to tell his parents the truth. What’s worse? Being told one night, a soft, tentative voice hanging above as he was tucked in, telling him in the easiest way possible that his parents had moved, unable to handle the constant reminders of grief regarding their two hopelessly lost sons.

 

 

Another thing about small towns is their tendency to stay the same. Everything remained the same through the years to an almost scary extent. There may have been one or two changes like a new house here or there, or renovations to some of the buildings already present, but never anything drastic. City hall still remained standing tall and proud and somewhat broken down with the broken clock out front. The pothole in the residential district was still the grievance of all grievances according to the two old gentleman who committed to sitting down at their same table at the same dinner, every day at six o’clock sharp. Every morning.

And just as those men lingered and loitered, it wasn’t hard to find one of the 'Missing Persons' posters laying in the gutters or taped to a light post still. They had been plastered all around the town like wall paper on the side of each building. Walls of the same two school photos; one overly perky redhead with sunspots and freckles and bright amber eyes looking at the camera through glasses too big for his face, and one slightly older looking blonde who was clearly putting on the best ‘I don’t care’ expression behind a pair of dark shades. Now those photos were faded along with the words, the weather washing away the majority of color ink and leaving sad impostors of the boys that had been. On some lazy Sundays, if you looked close enough, it was almost as if you could still see the ghosts of the big city police cruisers lined up along the streets outside the middle school or down the main avenue. The town had been in uproar for it’s fifteen minutes then slowed down once more upon declaration of the case gone cold. Nearly ten years later and the town was in it’s lulled state once more. The world could apparently survive without the two little boys.

Though it wasn’t like the younger boy was very small, nor very plucky anymore. Years of sunburn and tans had rendered those sunspots invisible, and somehow even more freckles had spawned on the previously soft complexion. What had once been a boy picked on for being smaller, shorter, chubbier than his older brother, was now a young man very well off in the way of height. Lanky and close to lean (if he were to put in just a bit more effort into those daily chores), Davis stood to be a rather interesting individual. No one ever recognized him with his hair so scruffy and his appearance such a mess at any and all times. Part of it was purposeful for the sake of anonymity but some of it was for the mere practice of getting himself dirty. 

He had gotten into the habit of taking the long way through the woods. It was a longer trek, but the idea of coming out of the deep under bush right into the wide open field of the middle school made him moderately uncomfortable. A small feeling at the back of his neck that told him someone, somewhere would see and suspicious - even if he was careful to only come out after school hours but during the adult’s work hours. It was the perfect window to be able to get what he needed and get out. The walk through the town was the weirdest part each time. The dingy, folded dollar bills in his sweater pockets were fondled and brushed between his fingers as he kept his eyes on the sidewalk and counted each man made crack in the concrete.

As he stepped into the local grocery store the door went off with the same cheery little chime it had made for years. Maybe at one point the sound didn’t glitch in an off high note at the end, but overuse had funny ways of changing these things. The inside of the store had a fresh scent the came along with the small, periodic spurts of water over the nicely displayed fruits and vegetables laid out right within sight of the first step into the door. The lights overhead lit the building with a white light that seemed to be trying to come off as soft but could only achieve it when paired along with the afternoon sun coming in from the windows on the other side of the checkout stations. Davis’ worn boots squished down onto the semi-clean floors and tracked the mucky soil behind him with each step he took into the familiar setting. Even though he could have sworn he saw the glares from the minimum wage high school student workers who would have to clean the floor, he ignored them.

He kept his head down and his hands shoved into his pockets until he got to the aisle he wanted. Past cereal, past candy, past the chips and this and that, all the way to the baking and spice aisle. Only then did Davis let himself look up to rows of spices before him. In his head he went through the list.

Basil. Bay leaves. Cinnamon. Vanilla. Sea salt. Earl grey and green tea. Honey. More jars if possible. Any kind of candle available, preferably white. Or… Was it mint instead of cinnamon? Doubt crept up on him from behind the longer he stood. In the end, a shitty guess was better than coming back with nothing at all. Without having the thought to get any kind of basket beforehand, he managed to haphazardly carry the selective of herb and spice in his arms while wandering to pick up the other odds and ends. It was hardly fifteen minutes before he had made a nice trail of boot prints leading all the way back to the front of the store where he set the items down on the conveyor belt to be brought to the high school-er working there in the obnoxiously bright green apron.

“Is that all for you, sir?” The brunette in front of Davis asked as he started to ring through the items lethargically. No doubt the boy was day dreaming of the million other ways he could be spending the sunny afternoon. “No, thank you. No, I don’t have a points card and I’m not really interested in the deal of the week.” Davis didn’t look up as he pulled the ripped and grungy bills out to start counting them out. Meanwhile the cashier with the shaggy dark brown hair had finally been brought to attention by the seemingly cold demeanor Davis had shown. There was a brief few seconds of just looking over Davis before the boy started to move again, going through the routine of scan barcode, beep, and bag over and over. “Alright, that’s fine.” There was still the friendly for-customers tone to the boy’s voice even as the next comment caught Davis’ attention. “You look really familiar though. Swear I know you.”

Panic opened Davis’ mouth before logic had a chance to close it. “Wh-what?”

“Do you go to the high school? Wow, I’m an idiot. Of course you do.” A little snort of a laugh left the cashier as he continued, oblivious to how Davis was staring at him wide-eyed like a deer in the headlights. “There’s no where else to go. I must have seen you in the halls or something. I only have two blocks each day nowadays so you might not see me around much anymore. I was in Mr. Joseph’s social class though, there was a redhead last semester.” The kid just kept going on and on even after the total came up on the register.

“You don’t know me.” Furiously flipping through the bills, Davis nearly slammed the cash down in front the rambling cashier. He grabbed his two bags in a hurry and bolted away from the situation, his chest feeling tight. No one had ever recognized him before. Not even when he had still had the bit of baby fat around his cheeks just before his sixteenth birthday, not even when he had spoken just a bit too much to the woman at the dinner when he had stopped to steal sugar packets. Yet some high school boy had seen him for half a second and known? Impossible. It didn’t take much to feel the pull of wanting to be back home. With the bags hanging at his elbows he crossed his arms, heading back with his chin tucked down, not knowing how he was going to explain what had happened.


End file.
